Ambrosian University of Milan, Italy.
Immunotherapy. 2012 Jan;4(1):77-86. doi: 10.2217/imt.11.158.
Recent advances in the knowledge of the mechanisms responsible for antitumor immunity have stimulated the elaboration of new cancer immunotherapeutic strategies. Moreover, more recent discoveries have demonstrated that immune responses are under a physiological modulatory control played by several neuroendocrine pathways, which explain the differences between the in vivo and in vitro immune responses. While until a few years ago the evaluation of the immune status of cancer patients was substantially established on the basis of clinical empirical criteria, recent discoveries of the antitumor cytokine network have allowed the biochemical bases of anticancer immunity to be defined, leading to new anticancer immunotherapeutic strategies, on the basis of patient neuroendocrine and neuroimmune status, in an attempt to correct the great number of cancer-related alterations on the basis of knowledge of the physiopathology of anticancer immunity. The rationale for cancer neuroimmunotherapy consists of the possibility to enhance the efficacy of the various immunotherapeutic strategies by a concomitant administration of antitumor cytokines (namely IL-2), in addition to neuroendocrine endogenous molecules (namely the pineal indole hormones), able to stimulate the anticancer immunoresponse by amplifying the anticancer reaction and/or by counteracting the generation of immunosuppressive events.
近年来，对肿瘤免疫机制的认识取得了新的进展，这刺激了新的癌症免疫治疗策略的制定。此外，最近的发现表明，免疫反应受到多种神经内分泌途径的生理调节控制，这解释了体内和体外免疫反应之间的差异。虽然直到几年前，癌症患者的免疫状态评估主要是基于临床经验标准，但抗肿瘤细胞因子网络的最新发现使抗肿瘤免疫的生化基础得以确定，从而导致了新的抗肿瘤免疫治疗策略，这些策略基于患者的神经内分泌和神经免疫状态，试图根据抗肿瘤免疫的病理生理学知识来纠正大量与癌症相关的改变。癌症神经免疫治疗的基本原理是，通过同时给予抗肿瘤细胞因子（即白细胞介素 2）和神经内分泌内源性分子（即松果腺吲哚激素），可以增强各种免疫治疗策略的疗效，这些分子能够通过放大抗肿瘤反应和/或抵消免疫抑制事件的产生来刺激抗肿瘤免疫反应。
